


The Bahamas

by Prosodi



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 09:58:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prosodi/pseuds/Prosodi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony makes substitutes for what he can't have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bahamas

Tony’s vacations are six hours long and snatched out of thin air like floating confetti, full of amber colored drinks and loud music and the sweet curve of a woman’s breast under his lips. In the blue dark, Tony’s bare feet on the cold floor, kissing the skin behind the shell of her ear, he takes the time to systematically unbutton her skirt. It’s a task that Tony can somehow relate to taking bolts from an engine block. They tangle in the sheets or on the armchair, sometimes later in the shower or across the kitchen counter. She’s blonde or maybe brunette, wearing a slinky dress or slim a-line skirt. She mouths along his throat with one leg over his hip, the heel of her foot pressing into the small of his back as they rock together.

“Oh, oh shit. Tony. Christ,” she huffs and Tony curls his fingers in her hair – curly or straight, mostly just tangled up between there and here – and he comes, then uses his fingers to bring her with him.

He waits until she leans back, satisfied and licking her lips – won’t put an arm around her because he doesn’t want to get caught up when she falls asleep, but he’ll curl against her side. When she does fall asleep (it’s late, inevitable), he slides out of bed and into a pair of sweats and takes the stairs down to the shop where he can tinker with something until he’s up for another round or Pepper shows up to escort the lovely lady out of his bed and off the premises.

\--

This is how it goes: Tony throws a party. He gets Pepper to order two truckloads of sand to surround the pool because it’s a Bahamas theme, because he can, because Tony would rather drink his liquor from a minibar that isn’t out of the back of a truck, and he likes having the option of taking long legged blondes to bed rather than behind a patch of rocks. By the time it’s over and all the playboy bunnies have gone home, there’s a fuck ton of dirt on the bottom of the pool and the whole drainage system is probably going to have to be replaced, but for now Tony lets it sit and idle. He tells Pepper to leave it all up, and for a week Tony Stark has a beach on his back porch complete with umbrellas and canvas reclining chairs.

Come morning Pepper finds him dozing in the shade of one of the striped umbrellas wearing nothing but a towel and huge sunglasses. She’s used to finding Tony naked, but isn’t accustomed to having to wade through two inches of sand to wake him up. She may or may not give him a pointed nudge with the stiletto heel of her shoes to jerk him awake. What he doesn’t know won’t kill him and Pepper isn’t above a vindictive edge when it comes to peeling her boss off a faux beach at seven in the morning.

“Nnghkwhattimeisit?”

“Seven fifteen. Here are a few emails I think you should look at before I respond.” Pepper hands him a manila folder, a sheaf of paper, which Tony uses as a screen between his face and the morning sun, squinting despite it.

“I’m guessing there’s not any ibuprofen in here,” he hazards.

She has the decency to give him a smile that drips off her lips like melting wax.

“You know, someone left a surprisingly tiny bikini in the front bathroom.”

“Tony.”

“Seriously. It’s practically microscopic. You should try it on and we can do all the soul sucking paperwork you want out here in the sun.”

“I’m going inside now.”

“I’ll even put sunscreen on your back for you!” he calls hopefully as Pepper turns away and hobbles back off the sandbar and through the sliding glass doors.

Tony opens the folder at arms length and lets the print outs fall like a hand of cards across his bare chest. Later he calls Rhodey and tells him it’s pretty much obligatory that he come over and drink a few beers if he values their friendship at all.

\--

Most of the women he sleeps with come with their own personal jewelry case, rocks big enough to construct a scale model of Stonehenge with. But Tony remembers being seventeen and screwing Meredith Cook, a girl he met at school. She swings by the New York place mid way through July, says she was in the area. So Tony takes her down to the basement garage and they talk shop while his parents are at some gala fancy enough that his mother can wear the blue dress and the diamond necklace she got for her birthday and not look out of place.  
Meredith is pretty, not beautiful, with a lot of freckles and thin framed glasses that she wears pushed up above her forehead unless she’s elbow deep in grease and leaning under the open hood of a car. She’s twenty-one and Tony thinks that not only is she amazing, but also that he is so fucking hard he can’t even stand it, so when she kisses him over the stainless steel table with one palm flat on a case of drill bits and the other curled around a socket wrench it isn’t slow but it is what Tony’s been waiting for his entire life.

He doesn’t even get his shirt off and she keeps her bra on, so it’s nothing but fucking – plain and simple. Tony sits on the workbench with the edge of the table digging into his spine as she rides him, thighs shivering and her long hair hanging in front of her ears where it’s not caught in her glasses. She talks about pistons and horsepower as she does him. It’s all Tony can do to hold on while she does it.

He doesn’t see her a second time that summer and she doesn’t talk to him come fall, and maybe he sort of cares but he doesn’t remember the resentment anymore – just the part where, for a week after they have sex, he couldn't sit in the garage and not think about valve action covers or push rods.

\--

Pepper never wears the same shoes two days in a row, but that doesn’t stop her from getting a slight tan line from the strap across her ankles. She gets enough of a sun burn while Tony suns like an iguana that she starts to clash with her own hair. Tony notices when he’s idling in the pool, elbows hooked on the edge as Pepper’s talk about stocks and the board meeting he’s supposed to be having tomorrow goes in one ear, festers somewhere he doesn’t at that moment recognize, and floats out the other. He’s about to call it quits and give the much awaited order that it’s time to sweep the Caribbean off the porch, make the exodus back to refrigerated air and real furniture when Pepper toes off her shoes, sits down in the sand and puts her feet into the pool. Any pretense of paying attention dies unmourned as Tony eyes her ankles through the rippling water.

“—put the printout on your desk. Also there’s a few documents the lawyers need signed and returned to them asap, so—. Tony.”

His hands have slipped under the water, catching one of her ankles between both palms. He’s waterlogged and sun baked and when he looks up at her, he can see her eyes go dark like ripe, sweet fruit. He traces the spider web left across her left ankle, just this side of sucking his lower lip between his teeth.

“Tony,” she says, again.

“Yeah?” like he doesn’t know.

“Dry off your hands so you can sign this.”

So he does.


End file.
